"Clay's Quilt" sings, with a voice as mighty and true as that of the fiery honky-tonk singer, Evangeline, and as sweet and haunting as the music of the passionate and mysterious fiddler, Alma, who grace its pages. I realize that "quilt" is the defining metaphor here, but for me this book was like music - a richly textured, multi-faceted, and infinitely satisfying hymn to life at its utmost. This is an impressive first novel. The writer has created people that live and breathe, and a place so real that I wanted to get out a map of Eastern Kentucky and look it up. Clay Sizemore has only vague memories of the tragic event that brought him to his mother's sister's house on a freezing night over twenty years ago. His Aunt Easter and others in his mother's family have given him a warm, loving upbringing and he appreciates it but he's determined to find some answers about his mother and father. His concentration on the past, though, doesn't prevent him from living wholeheartedly in the present. Along with his family and friends, he loves and worships and fusses and fights with great enthusiasm. These people invest their all in life House's descriptions of the physical world are heart-stoppingly beautiful. His writing is lyrical, but not without bite. I can find very little wrong with this book's construction and pace. It starts with a mystery and builds toward resolution in an altogether satisfying way. I found it refreshing that House confines the preaching and explaining which some young writers can't seem to resist to the dialogue of his coming of age characters, where it's appropriate. Two small things about the book bothered me - the extensive use of dialect, which may be essential, but which I found distracting, and some misspelled words. One of the best things I can think of to say about any book is that it stays with you. This one does. I finished it days ago and I still think about Clay and Alma, and Dreama and Gabe and Anneth and Easter. And about Marguerite and Cake and Darry and Denzel and Evangeline and the others. Did I mention what wonderful names the people in Black Banks have? In the book, it is said of Clay's mother, Anneth, that "A person so full of life couldn't just up and die..." This book is full of life. I wish it wouldn't just up and end.

Clay's Quilt is a powerful novel lovingly and masterfully pieced from the lives of the residents of Free Creek, Kentucky. Whether working, playing, laughing, praying, driving, crying, singing, fighting, dancing, hollering, or loving, these people do it passionately and with every fiber of their beings; these people LIVE. As a result, the novel itself lives and breathes and makes a joyful noise through the voices of its people as well as through their music. House's prose is lyrical yet unsentimental, fiercely grounded in real, concrete, sensuous and intimate details of everyday life. As the novel follows Clay Sizemore's struggle to find his place in the world and to make peace with a tragic past, we witness his tender and ferocious love for family and friends, his awe and gratitude at finally finding true love with a fiddle player named Alma, and his determination to make a home and a life for himself and his new family. House's voice is true and Clay's Quilt is a book both joyous and haunting, a story whose characters stayed with me long after I finished reading.

Vividly poetic in its description of Appalachian natural resources, heartwarming and honest in its portrayal of people linked by their love for their environs and family, Clay's Quilt is in the top three on my "re-read often" list. In this debut novel, Silas House deftly stitches a search for understanding and love with picturesque Appalachia.

Clay Sizemore is a character any reader will quickly befriend, not only because of the tragedy of losing his mother, but because Clay is a loveable young man. House's prose places the reader, like a close friend, beside Clay. Whether Clay is at work in the coal mine, walking the mountainside, or partying at the local honky-tonk, we are there with him, feeling the grit of coal dust in our eyes, smelling the air on Free Mountain, or throwing down a whiskey with a beer chaser on a Saturday night.

There is something to be said when a reader can feel for a story's rogues. Even the villains and the socially challenged characters in Clay's Quilt are people with whom a reader will identify. House takes us into their hearts, to the places that hurt, to those hidden areas where malice and evil ferment, torment and eventually explode with terrible consequences.

Life, human and natural, pulsates through the veins of this story. Long after its first reading, "Clay's Quilt" will warm the reader.